English - Novelist | September 19, 1911 - June 19, 1993
My yesterdays walk with me. They keep step, they are gray faces that peer over my shoulder.
William Golding
WalkStepMeGrayOverShoulder
Boys do not evaluate a book. They divide books into categories. There are sexy books, war books, westerns, travel books, science fiction. A boy will accept anything from a section he knows rather than risk another sort. He has to have the label on the bottle to know it is the mixture as before.
ScienceTravelWarBookSexyKnow
What a man does defiles him, not what is done by others.
ManDoneOthersHimDoes
Since most scientists are just a bit religious, and most religious are seldom wholly unscientific, we find humanity in a comical position. His scientific intellect believes in the possibility of miracles inside a black hole, while his religious intellect believes in them outside it.
BlackHumanityFindMiraclesOutside
A novel ensures that we can look before and after, take action at whatever pace we choose, read again and again, skip and go back. The story in a book is humble and serviceable, available, friendly, is not switched on and off but taken up and put down, lasts a lifetime.
HumbleActionBookStoryChooseGo
Language fits over experience like a straight-jacket.
ExperienceLanguageOverLikeFits
The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.
BookForgetWriterKnowsHeShould
Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state.
HumanInspectionStateOurCritique
I am optimistic when I consider the spiritual dimension which the scientist's discipline forces him to ignore.
DisciplineSpiritualI AmIgnoreHim
Marx, Darwin and Freud are the three most crashing bores of the Western World. Simplistic popularization of their ideas has thrust our world into a mental straitjacket from which we can only escape by the most anarchic violence.
IdeasWorldViolenceThreeEscape
Sleep is when all the unsorted stuff comes flying out as from a dustbin upset in a high wind.
SleepWindFlyingUpsetOutHigh
I must have been an unsatisfactory child for grownups to deal with. I remember how incomprehensible they appeared to me at first, but not, of course, how I appeared to them.
ChildMeRememberFirstDealBeen
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